Its somewhat damaged 250 GB HDD will be replaced by a Intel 320 Series SSD with 80 GB capacity. RAM will be expanded from one module with 2 GiB to two modules à 4 GiB (Kingston ValueRAM SO-DIMM 4GB PC3-8500S CL7).

The new SSD comes with built-in encryption, therefore I don't need my own custom initramfs-based LUKS+LVM approach anymore. Although shrinking the existing (amd64) installation is possible, I think it's time for a new, clean installation.

First, no swap. I have experience with a swap-less desktop system. My first netbook had 2 GiB RAM and 4 GB Flash: no space left for a swap -- and I didn't miss the swap space. Ok, memory demanding processes (e.g. mogrify with large images) got killed automatically, but that was tolerable and the rest remained stable. And as far as I know suspend to disk works with files, too?

Second, no dedicated /tmp partition. In previous systems I had one, mounted noexec+nosuid+nodev. This time, in my opinion there's enough RAM left for a tmpfs /tmp (size=2GB).

What do you think about such a setup? No swap, /tmp as tmpfs, ext3 as filesystem on a SDD.

Check that your SSD supports the trim instruction. It probably does.
If so, choose a filesystem that supports trim too. Later in life, when the enire 80G has been written once, this will maintain thw write speed.

Sectors that are freed when a file is removed will be erased ready to be rewritten , when the trim command is issued to the drive. They with thus be ready for immeadate reuse.
Without trim, the drive must erase a newly alocated block before it can be writte and erase is a very slow operation

That means ext4 not ext3. There are other filesystesm that support trim.

With 8G Ram, you can put /var/tmp/portage in RAM. Thats where all your builds take place. You will be able to emerge everything except LibreOffice and perhaps Firefox.

A 2G /tmp is huge. Just let it slosh aourd in RAM with no restrictions. shmfs will take up a maximum of 50% of your RAM by defualt and nothing if its not used.
It can also be swapped out but you won't have a swap partition. Its possible to have a swap file if you find you need swap on odd occasions.

Only you can determine your filesystem sizes from what you will use the system for._________________Regards,

NeddySeagoon

Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.

My netbook has 2GB RAM and 32GB SSD (eeePC). /tmp is on tmpfs, up to 1.5GB and /var/tmp/portage builds in tmpfs. 1GB swap. I can't build firefox with it like this, I have to use regular disk space to build firefox. Most other things build just fine.

I was hoping that compression is sufficient to hibernate most of the time... but really it's not, there were many times I couldn't hibernate because I was using too much memory. Probably need 1.5GB or so to hibernate all of the time, and maybe then some to deal with any swap that was used...

With 8G Ram, you can put /var/tmp/portage in RAM. Thats where all your builds take place. You will be able to emerge everything except LibreOffice and perhaps Firefox.

I already use libreoffice-bin because I didn't notice an advantage in wasting hours of CPU time for a source build. Are firefox-bin and thunderbird-bin worth a try -- apart from the artwork licence issue?

NeddySeagoon wrote:

A 2G /tmp is huge.

All previous systems had approx. 5 GB /tmp because K3B stored images in /tmp. Of course, that can be changed in K3B's preferences, but... old habits die hard. Well, perhaps 1 GB suffices.

NeddySeagoon wrote:

Only you can determine your filesystem sizes from what you will use the system for.

The sizes are deduced from the df output of my current system plus tolerance. Tomorrow I'll watch the impact of a 300 MB system update on disk usage (especially /var/tmp/portage). Perhaps I can shift some GBs to home..._________________Tempus fugit.

Setting usable capacity to 80% of the factory default configuration provides a balanced solution for many applications. Using more than 90% of the factory default capacity is not recommended, unless write component of the target workload is predominantly sequential.

Partition aligment is not needed:

Quote:

With the Intel SSD 320 Series, aligning partitions or RAID volumes is not required and provides no performance benefit.

NoOp I/O scheduler is recommended:

Quote:

With SSDs, it is recommended to use the simplest noop (no operation) scheduler, unless there are processes in the system that can produce excessive amounts of I/Os and starve other processes.

Conclusion after three months of usage: It works! With 8G of RAM and 80G SSD the notebook is booting blazing fast. KDM is up almost instantly, loading KDE takes only a few seconds. Now that was an investment (RAM: 40 EUR, SSD: 170 EUR) that paid off!

The tmpfs "/var/tmp" is not restricted in size, but a compilation of Thunderbird showed that there's indeed a limit at 4G (=1/2 of RAM as expected; the build failed because no space was left). But it is still possible to compile both Thunderbird and Firefox. Just remount /var/tmp with a slightly larger size limit:

The tmpfs "/var/tmp" is not restricted in size, but a compilation of Thunderbird showed that there's indeed a limit at 4G (=1/2 of RAM as expected; the build failed because no space was left). But it is still possible to compile both Thunderbird and Firefox. Just remount /var/tmp with a slightly larger size limit: